The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. By Michael Twitty (New York: Amistad Press, 2017). Pp. 464. Hardcover, $28.99.

At the 2018 James Beard Awards, the Foundation announced Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene as winner of the Writing Award as well as Book of the Year. This blogger, food writer, independent scholar, Judaic studies teacher, and food activist rightly deserves these prizes. His work began with his 2012 “Southern Discomfort Tour,” during which Twitty visited cites of cultural memory, particularly places critical to his family history, while simultaneously studying food history and contemporary culinary culture. In The Cooking Gene, Twitty documents the connection between food history and family history, from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom.

Twitty defines the scope of the book as pertaining to “The Old South,” meaning the former slaveholding states and the “history and culture they collectively birthed from the days of contact through the Civil Rights.”[1] Twitty uses this term to define his work, placing it in the title and defining it in the preface. However, two pages later he acknowledges the term is a “misnomer.” “The Old South” exists in the collective American mind as the “home of the original American rebel”—though Northerners might argue this title belongs to Revolutionary-era Bostonians.[2] Likewise, defining the Old South as a “forgotten Little Africa” negates the cultural adaptations both forced upon and chosen by Americans of African descent over the past four hundred years. To do so also erases the role of European empires, white settlers, Native peoples, and Latino communities in shaping the varied quilt work of Southern culture.

The Cooking Gene undeniably spans beyond
the timeframe that Twitty presents in the introduction. It is largely a memoir
of his experiences with food, and rightfully so. Twitty describes that his
“entire cooking life has been about memory”— a fitting statement for a culinary
historical interpreter. The author takes the reader back to his childhood
experiences with food, recounting his hatred of “slave” foods and tastes of his
first trips to the South for family reunions. Likewise, Twitty writes about the
relationship between food and his Jewish faith as well as the bond he formed
with his mother and grandmother through their shared passion for cooking.
Ranging from awkward to uncomfortable to hilarious, at the center of the book lies
a deeper examination of the culinary contributions of enslaved people and their
decedents.

Over the
chapters titled “Missing Pieces,” “No Nigger Blood,” “White Man in the
Woodpile,” and “0.01 Percent,” Twitty describes the research efforts he poured
into better understanding his family tree. His conclusion? He rejects his past
of being “just black or brown” and instead proclaims “I am an obsessive cook
with compulsive genealogist tendencies who can point to a map of Africa,
Europe, North America, and with it, the South…my food is my flag.”[3] My first thought upon
reading this conclusion of the questions and answers covered in the four
chapters was, “Well, what’s your food?” Fortunately, I kept reading, and found that
the remaining twelve chapters answered my question.

The final
two-thirds of the book grapple with the origins of an African-American food
tradition by tracing food from slavery to freedom and back to Africa. The
chapter titled “Mother of Slaves” explains the negotiation and conflict
surrounding food bearing an African American culture. Working through different
portions of the American South, from the Chesapeake and down the coast to
Virginia, through the Lowcountry, and across the Mississippi and Gulf, Twitty
describes that the landscape itself shaped regional cultures. African bondsmen
were forcibly migrated to these new environments, integrating into a
well-established cultural exchange with white settlers and indigenous peoples.
Subsequent chapters weave through specific foodstuffs. Twitty focuses his
chapter on sugar on the commodity’s marked relationship with New World slavery.
The author expands on Afro-Caribbean culture and its culinary influence in
colonial America, particularly the coastal South.

Twitty
also discusses the ethnobotanical history of the colonial and antebellum
South’s staple crops of corn, tobacco, and rice—particularly the labor
performed by enslaved fieldhands and cooks in preparing the crops for local
consumption. His chapter titled “Adam in the Garden” focuses on crops grown in
enslaved peoples’ provision plots and the African-origins of many of the
cultivars selected by them. In this chapter, his work builds on arguments laid
forth by other authors of the African Diaspora such as B.J. Barickman’s work on
early nineteenth-century Brazil, Amar Wahab’s work on nineteenth-century
Trinidad, and Judith Carney’s study of Africanized foodways on plantation
societies throughout the Americas. Expanding beyond their knowledge, Twitty
investigates the labor performed by bondspeople to grow these
genealogically-African foods. The chapter titled “Crossroads” returns to
present day and details Twitty’s exploration of self-identity. He particularly
focuses on the intertwining of food and spirituality in African and African
American traditions, specifically those surrounding death. The final two
chapters of his book record Twitty’s thoughts, feelings, and degrees of comfort
on trips returning to his two ancestral homelands- Western Europe and West
Africa.

All in
all, Twitty achieves the “sense of the bric-a-brac mosaic that is the average
African American’s experience when he or she attempts to look back to recapture
our cultural and culinary identities.”[4] So unique to this book is Twitty’s
writing style, which successfully weaves together his personal memoir with the
cultural and culinary past. A fascinating read and a unique journey, The Cooking Gene leaves this historian
wanting more. Twitty’s claims are exciting and progressive in the field of
Southern culture, African Diasporic studies, and culinary history but leave me
craving source citations for his profound assertions. I look forward to
continuing digesting the future works from Twitty’s “cooking pot of human
kind.”

Kelly Kean Sharp

University
of California, Davis

[1]
Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A
Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (New York:
Amistad Press, 2017), xiii.

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